He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing tight before he turned and faced Ian’s gaze. “We didn’t do a good enough job with her. Ella Sue said something to that effect last night and I didn’t want to hear it, but I’m starting to think…”
“As you said, she’s a grown-up.” Ian folded his arms over his chest. “Whatever happened when she was a child—”
“She was in the car with them,” Brannon said quietly. “She saw them die, was trapped in the car for more than an hour before anybody found them. She watched my mother bleed to death—Dad practically had the top of his head taken off the way the car flipped and hit that tree. She was trapped, alone in the car, Ian. She was only eight.”
Horror and pity welled up in Ian, so thick and strong that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Turning away, he moved to his desk and braced his hands on it, staring down at the brutally neat surface.
All day, he’d been haunted by images of her from the past night, her mouth swollen from his, her eyes fogged with heat.
Now he saw another image—that of a terrified young child, experiencing an indescribable accident. He knew how she’d looked as a child. After all, he’d spent many an hour at McKay’s Ferry, where she’d grown up. Pictures of the lovely child she’d been were everywhere. No, he could see that lovely, frail child trapped and sobbing.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know. Neve doesn’t even remember that night.” Brannon dropped into a chair. “We thought … we thought if she didn’t remember, she’d do better. People talked about counseling, but we were afraid if there was counseling, she’d remember. We didn’t want her to remember. There were nightmares at first. Bad ones. She’d wake up screaming. She’d climb into bed with me—fuck, I hated it. I was thirteen. I didn’t want my eight-year-old sister climbing into my bed. I put up with it at first, but then I started yelling at her. She stopped doing it, and we found out later she’d been in the family room with the TV on, holding on to Mom and Dad’s pillows. She’d stay down there. Ella Sue came in around five and she’d take Neve to bed, stay with her until she could sleep. Neve fell asleep in school a lot, started to fall behind…”
He stopped for a minute, sighed. Then he looked at Ian. “She got sick about six months after Mom and Dad died, just a bad cold, but Ella Sue told Moira to give her Benadryl at night. Neve was always smart. She figured out real fast that she fell asleep with it, and she talked us into giving her the Benadryl every night. Every fucking night. It was the only way she could sleep without the nightmares. At least that’s what we figured she was doing. She stopped asking for it when she was older, but when she left, we found bottles of it in her room. She’d started buying it herself, took enough that she could get a few hours of sleep. If she woke up with nightmares after that, she’d just stay in her room. Never told us.”
Brannon got up and started to pace. “She started getting in trouble in middle school. Kids called her a freak—she didn’t always manage to stay awake, cut school sometimes. Moira would yell, scold her … Neve would promise to do better, and she would for a few weeks, sometimes a month, and it would start all over again. Ella Sue tried to reprimand her sometimes, but Neve would just start crying and Ella Sue could never hold up against Neve crying.” Brannon stopped, looking at something only he could see. “None of us could. She didn’t cry for months after they died. We went out to see them on Mom’s birthday, though, and that was when she started to cry—she threw herself at the grave.”
Brannon’s jaw flexed.
Ian closed his eyes.
“They’re buried in the family vault at the cemetery—she pushed her arms through the iron bars … we had to call the groundskeeper to open the damn doors. She wouldn’t let go. She cried … for hours. Made herself sick.” He shook his head. “Anytime she started crying after that, we just remembered that day. We forgot how to say no.”
He swore then, hard, ugly, and low. “Son of a bitch,” he finished. He moved across the floor and jerked up the window, all but tearing at it as he fought to get it up. Brannon shoved his head outside like he’d die if he didn’t get air.
“Bran…”
“What in the fuck did we do?”
“You did the best you could,” Ian said quietly.
“And what good does that do for a little girl who conned her brother and sister into drugging her just so she could get a few hours of sleep?” Brannon demanded. “What good does that do for the kid who cried herself sick, clinging to her parents’ tomb?”
“You were thirteen when they died.” Ian didn’t know what to say here, what he could say. “Moira was the oldest of you, but fuck, she was all of eighteen, had barely started university, hadn’t she? And she took over the business for your father on top of that. You were still a child, Bran and Moira … God love her, she wasn’t ready to take over and be a mum.” He stopped and then asked, roughly, “Why didn’t they name somebody a guardian?”
Brannon turned and looked at him. Then he shook his head. “They did. But he’d ended up dying himself just a few weeks before—a heart attack. I know Mom and Dad had spent a lot of nights talking about what they’d do with me and Neve … they thought they had time.”
Blowing out a sigh, Brannon said quietly, “Things were bad the year she left. I think she was trying to settle down. Her grades came up—a lot. She’d aced her SATs—had scholarship offers from six or seven colleges. She wanted to go to NYU, though Moira kept trying to talk her out of it. Neve wasn’t going for it. Moira said she belonged here and Neve laughed. Then she said something about the board meetings and the business—if she belonged here, then we’d let her in on the business more. We both laughed at her. It just got worse from there. She kept her grades up, did better at school … got in less trouble, but there were … other problems.”
He headed to the door and opened it. “Neve wasn’t the only one who messed up. Maybe she didn’t reach out, but then again, we didn’t do much, either. And we were supposed to be the older ones—more mature. So if you’re that attracted to Neve and you’re avoiding it out of some misplaced loyalty to me, then you’re being an idiot.” Brannon went to shut the door, then he scowled and looked back. “And you didn’t answer me about the backpack.”
Ian scratched at his chin through his beard. “Aye. She had a backpack. Didn’t let it out of her sight even once. Didn’t want to let it go, truth be told.”
“Fuck.” Brannon looked at the floor for a long, long moment and then he strode away.
* * *
“Is that it?” Neve accepted Gideon’s card with the report number written neatly across the top.
“Yep.” He leaned against his desk. “Officially. Unofficially…”
Neve looked away.
“Unofficially,” he continued, “how about you tell me what’s going on? What’s with the backpack? What’s up between you and Brannon? You and Moira? What are these problems you mentioned?”
“So you have hours?” she quipped. Rising from the chair where she’d been sitting, she moved to the window and stared outside. Brannon’s Bugatti hadn’t moved. That car of his was hard to miss. Her gut clenched just thinking about climbing back in it with him, dealing with the car ride home.
He hadn’t believed her about the backpack. Not that she’d even mentioned what was in it.
What did it matter? A bunch of letters. So she’d poured her heart and soul out. So she’d found some … sense of self as she wrote them. Whether or not she had the letters didn’t change that simple fact, and whether or not she had them didn’t change the fact that she’d come home.
She was going to fix things with her family—or try anyway.
Looking back at Gideon, she took a slow, steadying breath, and then she nodded. “Okay. But this stays between us for now. I have to tell Bran and Moira some of it—I don’t know what I’ll tell them. But just don’t … whatever I tell you, keep it to yourself, okay?”
* * *
It was almost impossible to sum up the entirety of the past ten years of her life in anything remotely short and sweet. Actually, there was nothing sweet about it, although the two years in New York hadn’t completely sucked. College at NYU had been fun—sort of. She’d had to bust her ass, and for a while, she’d had to hire a tutor, not that she’d mentioned that to anybody—not then, or now.
There had been a few modeling contracts, and a few of them had been sweet, but she glossed over them. When Gideon probed more—asking about the jobs and why she’d hadn’t pursued it—Neve just shrugged it away. She could have told him she’d had a serious chance there, that there had even been times when she’d been forced to turn jobs down, because always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that she was at NYU for one reason—to prove herself. She hadn’t planned on letting anything get in the way of that.
Then something, no, somebody had.
William Clyde. William, with his so sexy British accent, clear blue eyes, and blond hair that he wore just a little too long, had knocked her off her feet.
He’d started showing up to meet her at the end of her classes or to take her to lunch. She had to admit, she’d kind of loved the envious looks from some of her friends on campus when they caught sight of him, or when he introduced himself and paused to take a hand, press a kiss to the back of it.
This elegant man was hers.
He would take her out to all the posh New York City restaurants that Moira would mention that she had frequented while meeting this guy from the board or discussing a buyout from a company. Always business, her big sister. She might be doing business at the best French restaurant in New York, but Neve had a sexy Englishman buying her dessert and hand-feeding it to her at the same damn place.
They’d been going out for nearly three months the first time she slept with him. It had been her first time and she’d cried through it, but he’d held her afterward and told her how much he loved her, how much he treasured her—she was his and he’d never let her go.
Never.
“I moved to London with him,” she said softly, skirting around the intimate details, moving back to the window so she didn’t have to look at Gideon now. “I figured I could go to school anywhere, and he had friends in the fashion industry—that was how we’d met anyway. And I did land some jobs there, good ones. Bigger contracts, even a couple of national ones. For a while, things were nothing but a blur of classes and jobs and … him. When I wasn’t working or going to school, we traveled. I got to do all the things I’d always wanted. Things that…”
She stopped, swallowing the words down now.
She’d hurled the ugly accusations at Moira and Brannon that day and she’d hated herself for a long time. She was done blaming other people. “Anyway. I’d wanted to see the world. William made sure I did. I was so completely under his spell,” she murmured. “I never even saw it. Not until it was too late.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked back at Gideon, saw that he had settled in his chair at some point since she’d started to talk. She had no idea how much time had passed. Her throat was dry. A look out the window showed that all the cars—save for Brannon’s Bugatti—were gone, and new ones had taken up the spaces in front of the pub just down Magnolia. “The only jobs I took were his. I’d changed my major to suit him. I’d planned on majoring in business. How could I actually figure out how to fit into the McKay family without knowing how business shit worked?”
“Neve, you are a McKay—you already fit in,” Gideon said softly.
She just stared at him for a long time and then looked away. “I ended up pursuing a degree in fine arts. Never graduated but I can tell you all about paintings and artists that bore the shit out of me. It made him happy, though, seeing me learn all these things he thought a refined lady should know. And as long as I made William happy, I’d have somebody who loved me.”
With her back to Gideon, she didn’t see the way he closed his eyes, couldn’t see the way his hands tightened into fists under the table.
“I sent a Christmas card home. I was twenty-one. I hadn’t spent a Christmas at home in three years.… I sent a card to you, and one to Brannon and Moira.” She flicked him a look, a faint smile on her face. “I had Hannah Parker figure out where you were. I called her off and on for a while.”
“I got that card,” he said quietly. It was one of the very few times he’d heard from her. “I wrote you back.”
She blinked, startled. “I never got anything.” Then she looked down. “But that doesn’t surprise me. I wouldn’t have even known there was a wedding going on if the invitation hadn’t been sent via special courier. The courier ended up finding me while I was out shopping. I never did anything but shop. The job contracts had stopped coming. That summer, we’d gone to Italy and I didn’t get registered for the upcoming school year … William acted like it wasn’t a problem—maybe I should just plan on learning the other things I’d need to know.” She paused and then muttered disgustedly. “What other things? Shopping? That was all I did. Twice a week, I’d go out, go shopping—I owned more clothes than I’d ever wear and I only went out just to get out.… William seemed to think it was cute and he liked it when I’d show off the clothes. Like I was a fucking doll. I’d go out of the house with his driver. who would walk me into the store and wait for me … and that was where the courier found me. In a damn store.”
A watery laugh escaped her and she looked at him. “Do you know what he said?”
Gideon just waited.
The anger, the horror, all of it was just as fresh now as it had been then.
“This guy tells me he’s been trying to speak with me for nearly a week. Whether or not I wanted to accept the letter, could I at least have the courtesy to sign that I’d refused delivery?” Closing her eyes, she forced herself to take a breath, then another.
That night was the first time William ever struck her. She’d demanded to know why she hadn’t been told her sister had written to her, and he’d just backhanded her.
The next day while he was at work, she’d left. She’d just packed up her belongings and left.
Her first stop had been to file a police report. The officer had stared at her with such skepticism—then he asked if she was sure she wanted to do that.
William, after all, was quite the name in London, famous and well respected. He was a barrister and handled contracts for one of the most high-end fashion designers in the world. He often spoke out for human rights and was on the board of several well-known charitable organizations.
Surely he’d never strike a woman.
It took him less than a day to find the hotel where she’d registered. She’d refused to answer the door, but the next day, she was asked to leave.
He’d been waiting for her outside and he’d begged, pleaded with her to forgive him.
He just didn’t understand why she’d consider leaving, going back to a family who’d ignored her for the past few years, people who had never once bothered to call, people who didn’t even bother to send a Christmas card or a birthday card.
He’d struck at every vulnerability she had.
Why would you run back simply to attend a wedding? She only wants you there because it’s proper.
I’m the one who’s been here for you … I’m the one who loves you … I’m the only one who loves you.
“I stayed.”
* * *
Gideon was two steps from flipping over his desk, two steps from punching his fist through something.
This wasn’t the first time he’d listened to an abused woman tell her story. He heard it—too often—even here in this small town. Too many victims were never able to leave. Either they had no place to go or they felt like they had no place to go. The system too often worked against them, and in many cases it did just as much to protect an abuser as it did to protect the victim. Well, he has rights. Shit like that sometimes made him sick to even carry a badge.
But this was deeply per
sonal. He’d known Neve for too long. Had sometimes held her when he’d find her crying, tears she rarely gave in to around anybody else. He’d been her self-appointed guardian since he was nineteen.
Gideon had been the one to find the car that night. He’d been on his motorcycle, speeding away from the McKay estate after yet another stolen night out in the pool house with Moira.
Although that night had been different.
That night, he’d made her his, just as she made him hers. It had been their first night together and he’d been satiated and all but glowing with the love he had for Moira McKay.
Knowing he wouldn’t sleep for a while, he’d pulled his bike over by the roadside and pulled out the cigarettes Moira hated. Because she hated them, he only smoked them at night, after he’d left her, knowing there would be time for the smell to fade before he saw her again.
As he stood there blowing smoke rings into the air, he’d heard the sound. Faint and soft in the velvety darkness, he almost hadn’t heard it at all.
But it had come again.
Broken and soft, like a kitten’s mewling.
He’d wheeled his bike around, pointing the single headlight toward the trees across the road from him, and he’d seen the car. Dread had crushed him from the very first moment, because he’d recognized the car, even upside down and mangled.
Somebody had driven by in that moment, and he’d almost gotten run down by the sheriff who practically lived to throw his ass in jail. Only the sheer terror in his voice had made Sheriff Jacobs listen to him.
The man’s fondness for donuts had allowed Gideon to reach the car well ahead of him. He’d gone to his knees to approach that mewling sound ripping at his heart. Then he’d seen her, curled up in a ball on the far side of the car by her mother’s body. Covered in blood. Her mother’s blood.
He’d never forget the way she’d clung to him as he pulled her out of the wreckage, and he knew he’d never forget how she looked now.
Headed for Trouble (The McKay Family #1) Page 8